Between Thor Ragnarok's stunning reviews and Black Panther's record-breaking release weekend, Marvel seems to be hitting its stride. It's rare for a studio to put out two good movies within a year of each other, let alone two great movies within four months of each other. Perhaps uncoincidentally, these two films find some of the central messages of their mythic worlds in very similar, real-world histories: the colonization of the Pacific Islands and Africa.
Warning: Spoilers for Thor: Ragnarok and Black Panther.
On the surface, these films share a basic premise: a man about to be crowned king finds the throne challenged by the sudden appearance of a long lost relative. From there, they each branch out into their own stories, but the running theme of the effects of colonization remains constant in both.
Beneath Maori director Taika Waititi's unique humor and use of color in Ragnarok, he implements a narrative deeply reminiscent of his own history. The central antagonist, Hela, emerges from and exposes Asgard's history of conquering, devastating, and colonizing lands in its quest for wealth and power. She is Asgard's suppressed history back to haunt them, literally carrying out the same destruction on them and eventually forcing the Asgardians to become refugees, left to carry their culture on without the land it was created on.
Four months later, Black Panther introduces Wakanda, an African country that was never colonized. In fact, it has never been seen by the outside world, and, as a result, is the most technologically advanced country in the world. Where Ragnarok examined this aspect of world history by forcing its fictional world to reckon with it, Panther imagines a utopia where the destruction of an African culture and people was never a part of its history in the first place.
Panther doesn't stop at creating a sci-fi paradise, though. It takes its commentary one step further through its antagonist, Erik Killmonger. Left in America as a child, Killmonger has grown up with a very different perspective on Wakanda than his cousin and the film's protagonist, T'Challa, and what they owe their race. After so long spent in America and as a kill-counting soldier, though, he has developed a colonist perspective on justice. His plan to use Wakanda's resources to give weapons to the black people of the world and gain power through violence is well-intentioned but ultimately a very personal grab for power in a world where he had none.
Through a single character, director Ryan Coogler comments on race in America, the loss of a homeland, both figuratively and literally, and the protection and distribution of wealth. Killmonger is a powerhouse of a political character, and when paired with the literal embodiment of colonization, Hela, the two most recent Marvel antagonists present some real questions about the world's running history of colonization. Both of these films are in direct conversation with both that history and with each other, specifically from the perspective of two directors from cultures that have seen that history in action.
Here's hoping these themes continue and develop with the few minutes Thor and T'Challa get to claim the screen between shots of Steve Rogers and Tony Stark looking sad in Infinity War.
